IV drips are not the cure for hangovers (believe us, we tried it)

The holiday season is a time of hangovers piling on top of hangovers – wouldn’t it be glorious if there was a fast and effective cure? Reviv’s IV treatment promises a respite, so GQ went down to try it out after our own Christmas bash...

The day after GQ’s Christmas lunch, I find myself in what feels like the Starship Enterprise: in cool, sleek and almost entirely white surrounds, I am sat down before a TV screen showing me adverts for the product I have already come in to try.

A doctor comes and sits down next to me. “How are you feeling?” asks Dr Pascale Ricci, and the aches and pains all try and speak over one another. GQ’s annual Christmas bash had ended – or at least my memory had – around the time a waiter asked if I wanted to rescue him from his tray of cocktails. Very little else comes to mind, beyond the fact I woke up with a pizza box for company. Today I am very glad I had booked in to try Reviv’s intravenous vitamin treatment: a Hail Mary hangover cure the likes of which have never been needed before and hopefully will never be needed again (or at least not until next year’s office do). The question is: does it actually do anything at all?

Reviv as a business has been going since 2011, started in Miami by four emergency medicine doctors and then moving to Vegas and the rest of the world, with 80 clinics across 34 countries. The Fitzrovia, London, storefront opened in 2017 – one of its flagships alongside New York and Hong Kong. It offers a whole plethora of different bags full of opaquely named vitamins (which the staff will explain to you in great detail) designed to help with any number of problems. The treatment I’m here to look at is described as being particularly good for people who are massively hindered but still need to go about their day: if you have jet lag, for example, or a cold, but still need to go into work. Or, for example, if you discovered how good Espresso Martinis were at 5pm in the afternoon the day before.

When I arrive, I’m sat down and asked what my symptoms are: my head feels surprisingly fine, but my body less so. Pascale offers me a couple of alternative treatments and I end up going with the Ultraviv – Reviv’s signature treatment, which costs £129 – with added glutothyone. She explains that it contains B12, vitamin C, n-acetyl cysteine, dexamethasone, antacids and magnesium (which is great for relaxing muscles).

I’m in at 11.15am and taken into a small room where I’m sat down and my catheter is inserted into the crook of my elbow. Then I’m taken out into the main seating area, with the TV screen and the smooth white leather sofas, and I’m sat down and plugged into an ethereal pink bag of vitamins: the Ultraviv. Pascale injects two extra syringes of glutothyone at the start: it’s something the body gradually produces less of over time, is great for your organs and apparently leaves your skin, hair and nails looking amazing.

By 12pm, my bag is empty: apparently the body drinks it in quicker the first time. There were some symptoms that Pascale described that I definitely felt – a restless tapping of my feet, for example, from the glutothyone – but it’s hard to tell how much of my body’s improvement is because I just had a litre of medical goodness inserted into my bloodstream and how much is because it’s been a few hours since I woke up.

In an attempt to get to know a bit more about what I’d been through, I sat down with our GQ Doctor, Dr Tamer Rezk from medical wellness service Phycore, to ask: what exactly did I gain from having this added into my body? The answer, he says, is: probably not much anything at all. “The feeling currently in clinical medicine is that IV Vitamins have little in the way of evidence base, are not seen as a drug or medicine therapy, and whilst appear very attractive to clients are much of a fad,” he concludes.

“There is quite a simple principle with vitamins: nearly all of them, (apart from Vitamin D) are absorbed via the GI tract, so IV vitamins don’t make a great deal of physiological sense,” said Rezk. People often report feeling ‘re-energised’, but those benefits you’re feeling are much more likely to be from a large shot of hydration after a heavy night of drinking, rather than a surge of vitamins entering the human body via the blood stream. "What I tell patients," says Rezk, "is if you hooked them up to a £1.09 litre of saline, they’ll probably feel just as good as a £200 vitamin drip.”

In fact, he would argue that the money one could spend on a drip like the Ultraviv could be better spent: “I’d say spend it on something with a much better evidence base in making you healthier, like three PT sessions or some high quality non refined foods, which have a world of evidence and studies behind them.